Thoughts on statistics….

Its been quite some time since I blogged. Not gonna make excuses…its just been really low on the priority list lately, just trying to survive work, kids virtual school, staying at home, surviving anxiety, and combating some health issues (not related to Covid, but made more difficult because of its presence).

Some folks might know that IRL, I’m an industrial hygienist (IH). In UK-English speaking countries, its also called occupational hygiene, but either way, its a field most people have never heard of. There are various definitions of what a IH does, but basically, we work at the intersection between environmental health and public health in an occupational setting, with a focus on hazards created by the work itself. Our job is to predict, identify, measure, and document certain types of health hazards in the workplace and offer guidance and recommendations about how to control or mitigate them. We specifically look at physical hazards such as noise or vibration, radiological hazards, chemical hazards (things you might inhale or absorb through your skin), ergonomic hazards, etc. We apply a combination of research and regulatory requirements to advise people on how to best stay healthy while doing jobs that create health hazards. I say all this to explain that, while I’m no virologist, in my day job, I am a scientist with actual experience at interpreting and applying data and, more importantly, perhaps, trying to explain it to people in a relatable way.

As of today, there have been 26,957,001 recorded/confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the United States. This number is almost certainly artificially low–as many as half of all infections may be asymptomatic or so mild that they are explained away as other things by people that never get tested.

On average, a person with Covid-19 probably infects 2 other people (estimates are between 1.5 and 3, though the real picture is that lots of people don’t infect anyone and a few people infect lots of people because too many people are still idiots and assholes).

As of today, 462,037 people in the US have died. I’m picking on the US because we have demonstrated ourselves to be the stupidest populations in the world, with a wide swathe of people incapable of following the simplest of precautions.

On January 20, a friend posted a photo of Woodstock from overhead as a demonstration of what 400,000 people might look like. Four hundred thousand people is a hard number to visualize. This photo of Woodstock has about 500,000 people in it, according to TIME:

Its hard though, to estimate numbers from pictures…or even when doing population counts (I’ve done, for example, a number of bird counts…and I’m not that great at estimating flock numbers). I prefer something my brain can wrap around more easily.

At some point, I started using city populations to compare the COVID-19 death rate in the US because I was sick of seeing idiots that don’t understand statistics misuse percentage rates to mischaracterize the seriousness of this illness.

Back in mid-November was the day the number of US deaths reached the population of the county I was born in. The equivalent of dozens of small cities and towns and farming communities outside of a major metropolitan area (St. Clair County, IL is located right across the Mississippi River from the city of St. Louis).

Not even a month later (Dec 14th), you could have upgraded to the population center across the river; imagine the entire city of St. Louis, empty.

By the 19th of January, the death toll was equivelent to the city of Arlington, 49th largest city in the US.

By the end of the 20th, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

By the 21st of January, it was expected to be equivalent to the population of Tampa, Florida

By next week probably (at this rate), Oakland, then Minneapolis a few days later.

At the time, my prediction was that in 2 weeks, the number of deaths would be equivalent to the populations of Virginia Beach, followed by Colorado Springs, Long Beach, and Miami. Seventeen days after I wrote that, we are almost at a number of deaths equivalent to a hurricane taking the entire city of Miami off the map.

Give it a day or two.

By Valentines Day, an Atlanta or Sacramento worth of people will have died. I’m not sure when we are predicted to hit 600,000 deaths, but at that point, we can start talking states worth of people–our least populated state, Wyoming, has around 583,000 people.

At some point, large numbers become abstractions for most of us. Even for those of us that are used to looking at large numbers in data sets, there’s a certain distancing that comes from the abstraction of a number so big we cannot really wrap our minds around the significance of it. We need a way to ground ourselves with what it really means.

For me, its cities. A death isn’t just the loss of a person, its the loss of their memories and knowledge. Its the loss of their love and energy towards whatever it is in life that was their passion. Death empties a home, puts a hole in a family, rips out a few threads of a community.

This past year, we have lost an extra major metropolitan area’s worth of people from our country.

Since science has the ability to model the effects of different measures taken and how they affect transmission rates and death rates, I feel comfortable saying that a good chunk of those deaths were preventable.

A good chunk of those people were killed by those among us who bought into by pseudoscience, idiotic conspiracy ideas, and propaganda.

So don’t tell me I should get over my fury at those of you that were complicit in engaging with, defending, and spreading this administration’s poisonous nonsense. Don’t tell me in the interests of “unity” that I should ignore how too many of you cared so little for your neighbors and your communities that you chose subservience to a small minded, small hearted braggart over the actual doctrine of your professed faiths. Don’t tell me we just have a simple difference of political opinion when you aren’t even done washing the blood off your hands.

We have killed an entire major city’s worth of moms and dads and grandparents and kids and veterans and teachers and nurses and doctors and cooks and clerks and construction workers–from a single disease that was largely unknown to science before 2019–people who had lives and families and communities that depended on them, whom they loved, and whom will forever be missing them, wondering if their beloved dead was a death that could have been prevented.

These are extra deaths beyond the normal background death rate. So the next time some moron on your timeline comments that “only 1% of people die from it” (the 1% probably incorrect–depends on whose estimates you use, far from certain, and given the rate of underreporting of infection, there’s just as much evidence for an underreporting of COVID deaths as well), 1% is a fucking lot of people when we are talking about a virus that is spreading exponentially. Also, anyone that applies the “just 1%” logic to the fact that the virus does not affect populations equally, as an excuse to accept much higher death rates for *some* people, things start to sound awfully…well, like an embrace of eugenics.

We can’t stop a runaway pandemic on a dime. This isn’t going to end, even with vaccines being rolled out, for months. Every person infected is a chance for further mutations that can make the disease more communicable or more deadly…or worse, immune to the vaccine we’ve just created.

Wear your damn mask. Stay the eff home. Listen to fucking scientists not sycophants.

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Saturday Evening in Bavaria Musings, Living room edition

I’ve not done one of these in a while…

Rainy-day Playtime: 

Sharkbait in the playroom, on the aerial hammock

Tea of the Day: I’m not sure.  My son made a cup of tea for me this morning, and by the time it was cool enough to start sipping, the cat was drinking it.  It must have been epic.

And in other news: One advantage of being in Germany at the moment is how very far away I am from the news in the US in some ways.  Thank the gods…

But even so: I feel for those of you much closer.  As it is, I have this feeling that I can only describe as a cross between hamsters in a wheel running nowhere and that feeling when you know your car is running on fumes, your fridge is empty, and you still have two days till payday.  I can only imagine how it feels to be dealing with the crazy up close.  And to change the subject because I know so very many people are so very burned out at the moment….I’ve been…

Weaving: If you follow me on social media, you may be aware that I’ve been making potholders!  There’s this awesome little yarn shop in the Ansbach Alstadt where I picked up a nifty round loom and have been using scrap yarn and dyed fabric to make potholders.

There’s also been a bit of crocheting…  But either medium, I’ve been doing quite a bit of escapism via fantasy (books, games, shows, and just plain old imagination) and crafts.

Weirdly, without even trying…I’ve lost about 35-40 lbs since moving.  I’d say it from less stress, but that’s a lie, the stress has just been different.  I think its actually from the relative lack of preservatives in food here (while we have access to the commissary on base, there’s only a handful of things we get there) and the incredible lack of fast-food availability.  I didn’t *think* we had it that much, but with two kids in afterschool activities 4 days a week, we probably had it more than I realized.  Plus, we walk a lot more.

Panoramic view of Ansbach

An Optimistic Closing Quote (one of my favorites): I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. (Theodore Parker)

…eventually (addendum mine)

The Irreverent and Unconventional Guide to Holiday Tunes

Tags

Christmas, music, yule

As a Pagan, I have a confession to make…

I love Christmas.

Ferreals.

I love it. I love the trees, the decorations, the lights, eggnog–I even love fruitcake.  Sure, we have Yule/Solstice (Happy Belated, BTW, either way you celebrate it), but it’s still weird to celebrate a what amounts to a major cultural holiday on the wrong day (even if much of the iconology we associate with Christmas has its start in pre-Christian traditions)…  It’s a bit like being the only person celebrating the 4th of July on the 1st of July.

But the thing I love the most of all is the music.  I think it because I associate it with one of the most treasured traditions of my childhood…  You see, I come from a musical family upbringing (unfortunately, I’m the least musical of them all), and every Christmas of my childhood included a rousing hour or so of various relatives pounding out tunes from yellowing pages of sheet music (I am, however, an excellent page turner) and taped together books of Christmas music on the piano..or whatever other instruments they had brought along (including the good ole voice box).

Unfortunately, the Winter Solstice just doesn’t have that many singable carols…

Yes, we have music (a huge improvement from my early days as a Pagan).  As much as it makes me smile when I hear it on the rare occasion its played radio, Jethro Tull’s Solstice Bells does eventually get tiresome on the 347th replay for the season.  And sure, there’s the ever-popular Santa Claus is Pagan Too, by Emerald Rose and The Christians and the Pagans by Dar Williams and Bring Back the Light by Gypsy, or there’s Inkubus Sukkubus’s Hail the Holly King and Solstice Evergreen by Spiral Dance and Lisa Thiel’s Winter Solstice Song…but (with the exception of Santa Claus is Pagan Too), they just don’t have the same je ne sais quois as a rousing round of Jingle Bells.  Nor do many of them possess the solemn beauty of Silent Night, though there are some lovely mostly songs  the Solstice–like this piano solo on Michele McLaughlin’s Christmas album or this demo by Peter Gundry, or Tori Amos’s Winter’s Carol:

Or, perhaps familiarity is partially to blame; after all, Oh Holy Night, which is one of my favorite Christmas AND Yule tunes, only requires a slight bit of rephrasing to celebrate the night of the Sun’s rebirth instead of the night of Christ was born.  There’s this rather lovely rendition of What night is this? and about a dozen different Silent Nights (none of which I like).  None of this, however, solves the problem of what to do with holiday music once Yule is over and everyone else is still gearing up for Christmas.

So, here’s a few songs that celebrate the holiday season (all the holidays) with honesty and a jaunty tune…in no particular order of irreverence or unconventionality:

 

And, my personal favorite…

 

So, whatever your faith may be, and with all sincerity “I bid you pleasure and I bid you cheer | From a heathen and a pagan | On the side of the rebel Jesus.”

May your day be merry, whether you are celebrating Christmas tomorrow or not.

I am not a football fan…but let’s rant about protesting protest anyhow.

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anthem protest

My grandfather (a WWII veteran, whom I was inspired by to join the Navy) and I once had a conversation about flag burning…I was in middle school, I think, and I remember exactly what he said to me (because I wrote it down afterwards, and I’ve reread it over the years from time to time)–“I hate the idea of someone burning the flag. I think its disgusting and disrespectful and that is why I would never do it. But I support their right to do it–otherwise, I’d be no better than the Nazis or the Soviets. And I’d like to think I’d never considered the person doing it to be disgusting or disrespectful.  I’d like to think I would think it was a tragedy that someone felt that way and I’d like to think I was man enough to ask them why and really listen to their answer, even if it made me uncomfortable.  I’d like to think that I would want to figure out how to fix things so that they no longer wanted to burn the flag.”  Given that bending one’s knee is hardly burning the flag, I think that even were he disappointed in the form of protest, he’d be more concerned with fixing the ‘why.’

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

–James Baldwin (among the greatest writers of the 20th century)

The NFL anthem protest is not disrespectful–and I say this as a veteran–it is within the strongest traditions of this nation; indeed, the right to protest the failures of this nation to live up to its promises IS what makes this country great. This nation was founded on the very notion of protesting the status quo to overthrow tradition for tradition’s sake when that tradition is being used to deny the natural rights of mankind.  And of those rights, the very First Amendment (its actually six rights in one amendment) gives us the right to assemble peaceably, to redress grievances, and to speak freely. Don’t get me wrong, I joined the military primarily for health care and education benefits, but the only reason I take pride in that services is because I do believe in the duty to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic (and sadly, most of those enemies are domestic, wrapped in a flag, waving a gun, and toting a Bible).

Kneeling before the symbol that represents the failed actualization of this country’s ideals to certain segments of its population is far more respectful than blindly obsequious posturing before it as some metric of patriotism.

I’m more astounded at what this says about the American character than anything.  We’ve effectively said “Hey, we’ll watch your murderers, your rapists, your child and spouse beaters, your animal abusers…we’ll give you money for permanently disabling people through traumatic brain injury.  And its not just football–we’ll pay sports figures so freaking much their players can fucking build schools and shit, because our society can’t be bothered to just pay for schools–for our future’s fucking basic education,” (It is possible to think Lebron James’ actions are amazing AND think that the fact that *this is what funding good schools has come to* is a terrible stain on our national character–they are not mutually exclusive ideas).

But, you know, we white people just can’t seem to handle the idea that there might still be some aspects of our government and society where we aren’t living up to the values of this nation. Kneeling silently during the anthem–we can’t handle that. It’s somehow just the last straw, a bridge too far for far too many. I mean really, how pathetic is that? The NFL never even really required teams on the field until the DoD bribed them into it (maybe), and all of the sudden we are going to act like this is some travesty of unpatriotic behaviour? The only unpatriotic thing I see is the burying of thousands of heads in the sand over the very real problems this country still has with regard to equal protection under the law for all Americans.

And as a veteran (yeah, I’m gonna play the veteran card), you know what else really pisses me off about the conservative snowflake crowd?  Don’t fucking tell me how patriotic you are and how much you love this country when you are exploiting my fucking service and deciding for me what disrespects my service.  Especially if you haven’t served.  I mean, if they really want to respect my service, they should stop electing people that get us into shitty wars, stop voting for assholes that cut VA funding, and stop using shoving their interpretation of their Bible up my vagina.

This “its disrespectful of the service of our military, blah, blah, blah” stuff pisses me off immensely. How dare someone else tell me what disrespects my service?!? As a veteran, I put more stock in the Constitution I took an Oath to protect and defend than I do a piece of fabric that half these yahoos deface and misuse regularly as a fucking rag for their sweaty head or a piece of fabric to hold their boobs at the pool. Let’s face it, they only care about “disrespect” when its something that makes them uncomfortable–like other people wanting to actually have the same level of civil rights in practice that they take for granted.

And another thing, if taking a knee is SO disrespectful to the flag that its a reason to boycott football and deface Nike products, where the fuck were these bigots when it came time to decry Tebow’s disrespect of Jesus every time took a knee to pray?  And really, that shit actually took place during gameplay.  Don’t get me wrong,  I can think of half a dozen reasons to boycott football and Nike…but peaceful protest is not one of them, whether I agreed with the reason for protesting or not (though I do) or the method of protesting or not (while I would not choose the same for myself, I completely respect not only their right to do so but I also respect the manner in which they have chosen to exercise that right).  After all, it was a veteran (and NFL player) that suggested kneeling in the first place–

 But I thought kneeling was more respectful, and I will say that being alongside his teammates was the biggest thing for me.

And, you know, people – in my opinions and in my experience, kneeling’s never been in our history really seen as a disrespectful act. I mean, people kneel when they get knighted. You kneel to propose to your wife, and you take a knee to pray. And soldiers often take a knee in front of a fallen brother’s grave to pay respects. So I thought, if anything, besides standing, that was the most respectful. But, of course, that’s just my opinion.

–Nate Boyer, former Green Beret and NFL player, in an interview with NPR

What little hope I have held on to, that this nation might live up to its promises in my lifetime, have been gouged out by the stunning realization (more of my white privilege)  that completely reasonable peaceful and respectful protest is somehow more offensive to other white people than the continued and unapologetic disregard for the safety of their players on part of the NFL, or the continued employment of the players who have committed rape and domestic abuse, or the exorbitant fees they get paid while teachers have to sell plasma and drive for uber to afford supplies for their classrooms and make ends meet….or fuck, the subject that has caused this protest in the first place.

I mean, you can’t just get more misdirecting than this entire protest having been turned into a racially-privileged commentary on protest instead of the subject of that protest.

Conversations with my Daughter

Phee: The 1st amendment is the freedom of expression one, right mom?

Me: Yeah, why?

Phee: Nothing, I was just thinking about the story I’m writing.

Me: What were you thinking about?

Phee: Well, if the 1st amendment means jerks can say terrible and wrong things, it means the rest of us can tell everyone what jerks they are and tell them what we think of them right?

Me: Well, yes. But, you should remember that there are rules and laws that tell you how and when, from a social and even a legal standpoint.

Phee: Are you saying that we shouldn’t stand up when people are doing things that are wrong.

Me (gives the mom “Really? Did you really just ask me that?” look): Nope, not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that when you choose to stand up to jerks and bullies and bigots and all of the ills of humanity, you have to make a decision. What is what you are fighting for worth? Is it worth your life? Your job? Being arrested? Being ostracized? Being harassed by more jerks? Because these are the things that happen to people that are on the right side of history, especially when they are on the right side of history too soon for the sensibilities of most of society. You have to figure out what things are most important to you, and how much you are able and willing to deal with the consequences of how far you choose to go. You are one person, you can’t tilt at every windmill in the world.

Phee: That sounds hard.

Me: It can be hard. Some fights are easier than others because they are less controversial or have more sympathy from the public. You have to remember that not all laws are moral, or for that matter logical. The legal system, the government, its made by people. People are flawed…some of them are all sorts of fucked up…and some of them are wonderful. Most of us are all of those things at some point in our lives, and sometimes all at once. When you decide to stand up for what is right, sometimes you are standing up to the law and to the people in the government.

Phee: What if you get arrested?

Me: Phee, some of the best, most important people in history have been arrested for that–Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, Alice Paul…we even have a congressman from GA who has been arrested lots of times for that. And, for every person whose name you know, there are hundreds and thousands more that you don’t know. There hasn’t been a movement to bring rights to people from whom they’ve been kept where someone hasn’t been arrested.

Phee: So…if I get arrested when I get older for standing up to something bad, you would be okay with that?

Me: Well, if it’s standing up to protect someone or someone’s rights or to protect something that is right from something that is wrong, whether its a place or an idea…yeah. There are limits though–I wouldn’t be okay with you killing or hurting anyone, except in self-defense, or for participating in the destruction of someone’s home or business. But otherwise, yes.

(conversation falls silent as cogs turn in Phee’s brain)

Phee: Mom?

Me: Yes?

Phee: What does “tilting at windmills” mean?

Me: Well, have you ever heard the story of Don Quixote?

Phee: No…

Me: I guess a trip to the library is in order then!